Praetorian Rising, стр. 46
***
Camille woke in a haze of delicious warmth, blankets cocooning her body like a perfectly conformed second skin. For several disorienting moments, she couldn't figure out where she was, or what had startled her awake. Moonlight filtered in through the slivered window above her head, a subtle blinking haze of bluish light casting patterns across her green bedspread.
It was quiet, the kind of quiescence that pressed into her eardrums with unrelenting force. She usually woke to the soft rumbling snore of Lunci, a gentle press of Neeko's paws as he stretched at the end of her bed, or the tender song of early birds rising for breakfast; but now there was nothing. Silence enveloped her ears as the sleepy stupor cleared and a sharp pang of loneliness struck her chest without warning. Her mind raced with the recollection of Theo, his lips pressing against hers with such heat and wanton desire. There was no sense lying about it; she wanted more. Her stomach flipped at the thought of him being in her room again. She groaned and rolled onto her side.
According to the reflection panel just above her bed, dinner had been several hours ago based on the moon's placement through her window. The "sky" outside was bright, with wisps of clouds that obscured the moon's rays from time to time.
Camille rubbed at her eyes, and the second her lids closed she saw the image of her hand gripping a sword drenched in blood. Her breathing rose to a rapid staccato, and Camille blinked into the darkness, willing the hallucination to cease.
"Neeko?" Camille whispered to the shadows, trying to slow the galloping beat of her heart. There were a lot of places a black cat could disappear, and a room lit dully by a technologically generated moon didn't offer many clues about the animal's location.
Soft padding from the end of the bed crept up the blankets toward her, followed by a gentle purring. Neeko walked straight up to Camille and nuzzled at her fingers, before gently tugging on her hand in a request that she accompany him. She didn't even think twice; it had become a sort of ritual between them. Neeko had always pulled Camille into the woods at night, a kind of training of a different caliber. It had never been clear to Camille what Neeko was, but she'd always known he wasn't just a cat dead-set on killing mice—though he played the role well when necessary. He had a bright light of intelligence beaming from his yellowed gaze and she never doubted that he understood her every word.
Camille obediently peeled the heavy blankets away from her half-dressed form and fell prey to a case of the shivers. The wooden floors against her feet shot sparks of bitterness into her bare toes as she shuffled toward the side table drawers to retrieve an extra shirt, fluffy white socks, and freshly laundered pants.
She quickly glanced in the mirror above the side table and ran her fingers through her mess of tangled hair, opting to leave it loose down her back.
Neeko purred loudly from the doorway, urging Camille to follow without further delay. "All right, I'm coming," Camille murmured back, smiling as she opened the door and followed him into the main hall. Despite their one-sided conversations, Neeko always gave her a sense of ease when he was in her presence.
Walking up four flights of stairs and tiptoeing down endless amounts of hallways, Camille couldn't help but wonder where they were going. She was utterly lost yet again. If she ever needed to find her way back to her own room, she'd be hard-pressed to do it without a map. She prided herself on her expertise in tracking, but the metal, cement, and plastic compound appeared insanely upside down and backward in her tracking mind.
Neeko gave no purr or meowed response to her queries of where they were going, just continuing at a clipped pace up another flight of stairs and down a long corridor much less stark in color and appearance than the others.
The walls there were lined with heavy red panels of smooth cherry wood, and Camille's boots were soundless on the weathered cobblestone floor. There were no harsh fluorescent lights here, but soft glowing lamps emitting a gentle orange glow every twenty paces. It felt as though they had been transported into a completely different compound; the starkness was gone, and for the first time since arriving at Romeo Village, Camille felt a fondness for her surroundings.
The hallway abruptly ended at a metal spiral staircase shooting straight up through the ceiling. Neeko didn't even pause; he alighted on the first step and bounded higher, disappearing from Camille's view in moments. She approached the spiral staircase and looked up into what appeared to be the hollowed insides of a huge redwood. Camille's jaw dropped, and she was no longer worried about what she would find at the top.
She bounded up the steps two at a time, anxious to see what might be waiting for her. The last step up the winding stairs opened to a small landing stretched out from one of the topmost branches of the tree. An inlay of beams, netting, and foliage kept their perch well out of sight. Outside of a small open viewpoint along the far edge, they were well hidden from both intruders on foot and from the air.
There, Vesyon stood, silently staring into the stillness of their surroundings, leaning casually against a support beam. Dragging on a worn wooden pipe, he glanced at Camille before motioning for her to come closer.
"We're here in Romeo Village for a particular purpose, and I'm sorry I haven't yet explained to you why we must stay," Vesyon said after a long drag on his pipe.
He had a way of starting a conversation without any pretenses, which would typically catch Camille off guard. With Vesyon,